“The African Christians stood like the Church at Pentecost. They are blood-and-guts Christians who did not run from death.”
That is the way Kenneth D. Enright, a veteran United Methodist missionary, described believers in Zaire’s beleaguered Shaba province after the rebel invasion last month. It was the second time in fourteen months that invaders from Angola had come into the mineral-rich area formerly known as Katanga.
Enright was in Lubumbashi (formerly Elisabethville) on church business when the rebel forces hit the city of Kolwezi May 13. His wife, daughter, missionary son, and daughter-in-law were under siege in their Kolwezi house for nearly a week before he saw them again. African Methodists protected them until he returned to evacuate them the day after French paratroopers began to sweep the invaders from the city. While the senior Enright was separated from his family he sat by the radio in Lubumbashi awaiting news. At his side for much of that time was the area bishop, Ngoy K. Wakadilo, anxious about the wellbeing of all of the missionaries.
“If you want to know what is misery for an old man, it is to know your family is in danger and you can’t do a thing,” Enright told Methodist officials when he reached New York. On the day Kolwezi was invaded, his son John, 28, transmitted a message on a mission radio set: “They’ve bombed our house. The war has broken out. Mortars have hit the roof.… The windows are all shot out. What do we do?” The father picked up the transmission just as he was about to return home from Lubumbashi in his light plane.
Rebels had reportedly attacked the Enright home in the belief that Moroccan or other foreign troops were being sheltered there. A driver for the mission screamed at the invaders, begging them not to kill the Americans. John Enright was nevertheless taken off to a makeshift jail for questioning. On the way the party encountered a Methodist district superintendent who interceded with the rebel forces to release the American. He was freed a few hours later.
At one point during the siege a young African who had stayed in the Enright home to protect them offered to kill two rebel guards who were posted there. The senior Enright said his son told the volunteer, “God doesn’t want us to do that.”
Another Methodist missionary, Harold Amstutz, said after he arrived in the United States that the elder Enright escaped death because of his absence from Kolwezi. Amstutz reported that the rebels went to the Enright home to kill the senior missionary. A Methodist missionary surgeon, Glen Eschtruth, was killed in the 1977 invasion, and after that the rebels passed the word that “they were going to kill Bwana Kenneth next time,” said Amstutz. The explanation was that during the 1977 incursion Enright had helped to maintain radio contact with Zaire Army forces and some of the expatriates who were behind rebel lines for over two months.
During last month’s action, Amstutz picked up a transmission from Kenneth Enright in Lubumbashi. No one was addressed by name, but all were assured that everything possible was being done for them. The message ended with Enright saying that he would stand by to hear if anyone would acknowledge receipt of the message by a “click” of their microphones. As soon as that exchange was over the rebel troops drove up to Amstutz’s home and began shooting into houses in the neighborhood. He said they were “shouting ‘missionaire’ in a way I’ll never forget.” They were making a house-to-house search but stopped and turned in the opposite direction when they reached the residence next to Amstutz’s. “Most of the time we spent on the floor praying,” the former Marine said in Kanshasa after he and his wife were evacuated from Kolwezi in a Belgian military jet. Using the mission plane, the senior Enright flew his family to Lubumbashi. Five other United Methodist workers in the area also were evacuated, as well as a Danish Methodist nurse who worked with them.
While no missionaries are known to have been killed or injured in last month’s invasion, an estimated 600 Africans and 130 whites did lose their lives. A rebel outpost only fifty yards from the Amstutz home was the site of fierce fighting. On the morning after the paratroopers arrived the missionary crawled out on his porch and saw bodies lying all over the street. “Not just Europeans,” he said, “but the African population was slaughtered also.”
Before leaving Zaire for a year’s furlough, the older Enright made arrangements with government officials to allow Africans to carry on some of his work. After arriving in New York he persuaded denominational leaders to send funds for relief work in Shaba. He shares with Amstutz a concern for African church members. Amstutz doubts that Americans can return any time soon. The work of the church continues, however. Declared Enright: “The only thing working in Kolwezi today is the Methodist Church.”
Commenting on the report that he is on the rebels’ death list, the missionary since 1950 said, “I’ve been on their list, but I don’t worry about that because I am on another list—God’s. I say to God: ‘You lead; you take over; I’m yours.’ That is the kind of God I walk with and fly with.”
To The Rescue
Citing horror stories of oppression, tens of thousands of persons of Chinese descent have fled Viet Nam in recent weeks, a development that has attracted international press attention. Not so nearly publicized has been the steadily increasing stream of Vietnamese who have been leaving by the thousands every month. Most set out to sea by night aboard small fishing boats for a voyage of 300 miles or more. In many cases, the vessels are overcrowded, unseaworthy, and poorly provisioned. The “boat people,” as they are known, must face not only the elements but also Vietnamese navy patrols and pirates who rob, rape, and sometimes murder them. As many as 40 per cent or so perish at sea, say some observers.
Boats in trouble are often ignored by larger ships, such as freighters, partly because of the uncertainty over whether the refugees can be discharged at the next port of call. Some nations in the past have refused to allow the refugee boats to land and have even waved them off with shots.
Two California-based relief organizations announced last month that they will come to the rescue with ships of their own. Food for the Hungry purchased a large yacht and World Vision International leased a 345-ton LST-type vessel. Both will ply the Gulf of Siam and the South China Sea, providing small craft in trouble with food packages, medicine, and clothing. There will even be some replacement boats aboard in case a refugee vessel is in danger of sinking. The refugees, however, will not be taken aboard because of the political uncertainties, say relief officials.
The mercy-ship projects have the apparent approval of United Nations officials and government leaders of nations that reluctantly host the boat refugees. (An estimated 15,000 boat people reside in camps in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong. Another 12,500 have been resettled in the United States and other countries within the past year.)
Church Aid For Viet Nam
On May 20 the Greek freighter Antiochia dropped anchor in the harbor of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), having sailed from Houston seven weeks earlier. It was loaded with 10,000 metric tons of wheat grown in the United States, billed as a gift from North American church groups to the people of food-short Viet Nam. It was the first American-grown food to enter the country since April, 1975, when the North Vietnamese Communists overran South Viet Nam.
On hand to welcome the ship’s arrival were government officials, representatives of the government-sanctioned Committee for Friendship and Solidarity with American People (known as VIETMY), and a seven-member delegation representing Church World Service (CWS), the relief arm of the New York-based National Council of Churches. Accompanying the CWS party was a four-member TV documentary film crew, which provided film clips of the event for American networks.
CWS executive director Paul F. McCleary, a former United Methodist missionary in Bolivia, explained that the wheat was to be made into bread and noodles for distribution in schools, orphanages, and hospitals. CWS will not oversee distribution, he said, but he expressed confidence that the food will be channeled properly.
CWS undertook the $2 million wheat shipment to help offset a severe food shortage and “as a gesture of friendship with the Vietnamese people,” said McCleary, who was part of the delegation. Much of the wheat was donated by organizations and individuals (one of them, Kansas farmer Harvey Schmidt, was part of the CWS delegation). About $750,000 was raised by CWS from church groups to help underwrite costs (including some $700,000 worth of shipping costs alone). Only funds specifically designated for the project would be used, CWS announced in its appeals earlier (see March 24 issue, page 53) in an apparent attempt to mollify church people opposed to aiding the Hanoi government.
CWS has provided Viet Nam with humanitarian aid for sixteen years, McCleary pointed out, and even after the Communist takeover it shipped in food purchased in nearby Asian countries.
While the delegation was in Viet Nam another shipload of CWS-purchased goods arrived: $500,000 worth of equipment from Japan to be used to repair farm equipment and to make replacement parts for agricultural machinery. CWS will provide technical experts from Japan and North America to train Vietnamese technicians in use of the equipment, McCleary announced at a New York press conference this month.
Present at the press conference were three other members of the delegation: Alfred Bartholomew, a United Church of Christ executive who is chairman of the CWS policy-making committee; Robert S. Browne, president of the Black Economic Research Center in New York and a former U.S. government aid officer in Viet Nam; and Cora Weiss, a former antiwar activist hired by CWS as a consultant for the wheat project.
They told reporters that they were permitted to move about freely during their three-week tour of the land and to talk to anyone they wished in both the northern and southern parts of the country. They said they attended a Catholic mass and visited with both Roman Catholic and Protestant leaders. They also visited a village near the Cambodian border, and they interviewed refugees who told them of atrocities and severe food shortages in Cambodia. Ms. Weiss, of Reform Jewish background, was the chief information recorder of the group.
Archbishop Nguyen Van Bingh of Ho Chi Minh City, whose see has 180 parishes and 400,000 Catholics, gave the CWS representatives a message for the American Catholic bishops. He told the bishops “not to fear giving aid to a Communist nation” because the people there “are all human beings.” Ms. Weiss quoted him as saying that the 3.5-million-member Catholic Church is participating in “the common work of the nation,” and that Americans should not be “misled by any misunderstanding that we have given up our religion.” He pointed to a state farm near Ho Chi Minh City operated by priests and nuns and financed partly by $80,000 raised by church agencies, including some related to the World Council of Churches.
(Executives of Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. Catholic relief agency, said that CRS has donated more than $200,000 toward rehabilitation in Viet Nam, part of a $1 million aid project by the Vatican. CRS has been refused direct entry by Hanoi, a spokesman said, because of a CRS policy insisting on contracts that permit CRS personnel to supervise the distribution of donated goods in other countries.)
The CWS delegation members voiced no criticism of Hanoi, although they acknowledged that many persons are leaving Viet Nam because they cannot adjust to the new economic system. Meanwhile, said McCleary, much social progress is noticeable in Viet Nam’s urban areas.
Ruth Stapleton: Bowing to Pressure
Ruth Carter Stapleton, the President’s sister and advocate of “inner healing,” did not know until last month of the strong resistance by Jewish organizations to the work of the Hebrew-Christian groups that proclaim Jesus as the Messiah. That is how her agent, Mack McQuiston of the Wayne Coombs Agency in Los Angeles, explained her involvement in a nationally publicized controversy.
When Mrs. Stapleton appeared at the recent Jesus ’78 rally in New Jersey (see June 2 issue, page 46) she accepted an invitation to address this month’s annual conference of B’nai Yeshua (Sons of Jesus) on Long Island. The organization, best known for its evangelistic efforts among Jewish students on Long Island, subsequently publicized her forthcoming appearance at Shechinah ’78, and then the trouble began.
Mrs. Stapleton’s famous brother apparently heard about the controversy before she did, but she said he did not tell her what decision she should make. At a press conference in New York six days before her scheduled appearance at Shechinah, she announced her withdrawal from the event. She said the President had informed her of the objections of the Jews when they were together at a family wedding.
She waited as long as she did to get out of the engagement because she didn’t want to make a decision based on political considerations, she explained to reporters. Acknowledging that she got many communications on the proposed appearance, she denied that any of them “gave any political implications.” However, she added, there were some threats. After much prayer and “many sleepless nights,” she said, she “tried to get into the mind of Jesus Christ and ask what he would do.” That, she declared, is what led her to cancel. She indicated that her appearance would not be in the interest of reconciliation, a theme associated with her ministry.
Among the communications she received were letters from the Long Island unit of the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, and the director of the office of Jewish-Christian relations of the National Council of Churches. The NCC’s William Weiler told her that he objected to B’nai Yeshua because of what he called its “deceptive, dishonest, and unChristian methods” to win Jews to Christ. The Long Island Jewish group asked her “to reconsider your acceptance of this paid speaking engagement and, in the spirit of respect among peoples, refuse to participate in B’nai Yeshua’s June 8 crusade in Stony Brook or in any other activity aimed at the conversion of Jews from their faith.”
Founder-president Mike Evans of B’nai Yeshua was aware of the controversy and of efforts to get her to cancel, but he learned of her decision only the day before her press conference. The tip came from a friendly journalist who got an advance news release from an official of the American Jewish Committee. Agent McQuiston said he notified the B’nai Yeshua office of the cancellation the day of the news conference. He also told CHRISTIANITY TODAY in a telphone interview that the organization’s $750 advance toward Mrs. Stapleton’s $2,500 fee had been sent back. Evans said it had not been received four days after the news conference.
Rambling Willie
The white frame Church of Christ in West Mansfield, Ohio, has a new foundation, roof, baptistry, kitchen, carpet, sidewalk, bulletin board, and church bus, plus an assistant pastor, all made possible by a race horse named Rambling Willie.
Willie is half-owned by Vivian Farrington, daughter of the church’s pastor, C. Lloyd Harris, 85. Harris brought his daughter up to believe in tithing, and she gives 10 percent of Willie’s winnings to the church. The eight-year-old horse virtually came out of nowhere to win more than $1 million so far. Tithes on his winnings last year exceeded $50,000.
Mrs. Farrington’s husband bought a half-interest in the horse in 1973 for $15,000 and gave it to her for a birthday present. Until then Willie had won no races.
“The Lord said to give 10 per cent and he would bless you,” Mrs. Farrington told a reporter. “So when my husband gave the horse to me, I said I would tithe, and the Lord sure provided like it says.”
Appearing with the President’s sister at the New York meeting with reporters was Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Congress. Both insisted that it was her conference and not his committee’s, according to Religious News Service. Committee officials, however, arranged the coverage, prepared a press kit, and sent out releases before and after the conference.
Tanenbaum and other members of the committee staff have been active for years in criticizing efforts to evangelize Jews, especially those of the Hebrew-Christian organizations. He charged that the purpose of B’nai Yeshua is “to evangelize the Jewish people out of their continued historic existence,” and he praised Mrs. Stapleton’s decision as “an expression of moral courage, civility, and decency.” He apologized to her “for any offense which may have been caused to her by anyone in the Jewish community.”
Mrs. Stapleton dismissed the threats as not coming “from anyone I would feel to be a responsible source.” Her name, though, was on a poster tacked up “all over Long Island” by the militant Jewish Defense League, said Evans. The JDL called for demonstrators to show up at the site of Shechinah ’78 to protest the event.
As for B’nai Yeshua, she said, her action should not be construed as passing judgment on it. In accepting the invitation initially, she commented, “I was simply responding to an opportunity to share with another religious group some of the psychological and spiritual insights that have come to me over the years concerning how individuals can be made more nearly whole and healthy in their totality as human beings.” She expressed unwillingness to become embroiled in “the controversy surrounding the conflict between various Jewish organizations and B’nai Yeshua,” and she emphasized that when she accepted Evans’s invitation she “never thought I would be going to anything where I would try to convert Jews.”
Evans invited charismatic author-pastor Jamie Buckingham to fill the program vacancy. He also sent Mrs. Stapleton a message promising prayers for her and inviting her for a visit after the dust settles over the cancellation. He expressed regret for “the great pain you have suffered.” In a separate statement to the press Evans responded to the critics by saying, “We haven’t abused, manipulated, or distorted anything. On the contrary, those accusing us often distort our position and seem intent on undercutting our constitutional right to spread our faith freely.”
ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS
No Commencement
In a telephone directory’s classified advertisements, Clinton (Maryland) Christian School promises not only daily Bible reading and high academic standards, but also “traditional education.” However, last month’s traditional graduation exercise at the 900-student school in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., was cancelled to avoid litigation. Instead, a worship service honoring the twenty-one graduating seniors was held.
John C. Macon, the school’s founder and pastor of the Bible Baptist Church of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, which sponsors the school, called off the commencement services in order to prevent the valedictorian and senior class president from speaking. Michael A. Bongiorni, 18, had been expelled for violating a school rule against dancing and drinking. It was his second offense. His parents went to court to seek $100,000 in damages, claiming that the rule did not apply off campus and after school hours. They also said that he had submitted to a “paddling” by the administration as due punishment, and that there should be no further penalty. Macon insisted that the rules applied anywhere, any time.
Lawyers for both sides got together and worked out an agreement. The student’s parents, who are members of the church, agreed to withdraw the suit if the pastor agreed to treat their son the same as all other seniors. Macon decided that none would march across the platform, none would speak, and none would receive diplomas in the service. All would get the certificates either in the mail or by picking them up from the school office.
The incident stirred a series of front-page stories in both Washington dailies as well as letters to the editor. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen concluded that the whole matter was one of serious conviction, “of religious belief.” He wrote: “This is what the school is about. It would be like a rabbinical student eating pork. This is not just about rules. It is about sin, about education, and education not taking hold.”
Cohen quoted Macon as saying the Bongiorni family had “been here five years. They sat under my preaching every Sunday. My heart’s broken.”
Brazil: Slowing the Flow
More than 500 missionaries or persons otherwise classified by Brazil as “religious” have been entering that South American nation each year—until last year. That flow has now dwindled to a trickle, and missions executives are trying to discover what’s holding up the visa applications of the overseas personnel. The situation has become so serious that “representations have been made at the highest levels,” said one veteran executive.
The Associated Press reported from Rio de Janeiro last month that in the previous twelve months only sixty-five visas were issued to foreign Roman Catholic workers and six to foreign Protestants. An official of the Brazilian Bishops Conference was quoted as saying that the slowdown began last May and that no new applications were approved until this March. Alicia de Oliveira, identified by the wire service as an attorney for the Southern Baptist Mission in Brazil, said Protestants began to experience the slowdown last June or July. An unnamed “Protestant missionary official” was quoted as saying he had been informed last month that the military government’s intelligence service had just ordered a halt to the granting of all visas to “religious” workers.
A spokesman for Ernesto Geisel, the nation’s first Protestant president, denied that there is any special restriction on missionaries. There is, however, a general tightening up of immigration, he acknowledged. Carlos Atila Alvares da Silva cited a “general concern” for security. “With all the terrorism in the world, you never know when a terrorist might disguise himself as a priest,” he said. “It is tougher for anyone to get into Brazil now, not just missionaries.”
Missionary leaders were speculating, however, that the government was clamping down to prevent the importation of any more of the kind of foreign personnel who have drawn unfavorable international publicity. When U.S. First Lady Rosalynn visited Brazil last May she made a point of seeing two missionaries who had been jailed as suspected Communists in Recife (see July 8, 1977 issue, page 39). They gave her a message to bring back to President Carter. The two, a Catholic and a Mennonite, complained of torture and denial of rights in prison. General Joao Baptista de Figueiredo, the man picked to succeed General Geisel as president, currently heads the national intelligence service. His brother, also a general, recently charged that Catholic missionaries in the Amazon River area were spreading Communist doctrine and propaganda.
An estimated 75 per cent of Brazil’s Catholic priests and other workers are expatriates. There are about 3,000 Protestant foreign missionaries in the nation.
Spreading the Word
Nine million Bibles, 11 million New Testaments, and 390 million smaller portions of Scripture were distributed last year by the various member units of the United Bible Societies, according to a UBS report. The UBS noted that Bible distribution increased dramatically in Angola (the Bible Society of Angola reopened its office last year despite the civil turmoil), in war-torn Ethiopia, and in Idi Amin’s Uganda, where Scripture distribution exceeded more than a million books and portions for the first time in history.
Death
BILL RICE, 67, well-known independent Baptist evangelist and operator of a religious camp primarily for the deaf, brother of evangelist John R. Rice; in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, of a stroke.
Religion in Transit
The Synagogue Council of America this month condemned the recent Israel-related resolution approved by the governing board of the National Council of Churches. The resolution criticized Israel’s use of the “cluster bomb” in Lebanon (see June 2 issue, page 36). The council, which is the coordinating body for the main branches of American Judaism, noted that the measure omits mention of Palestinian aggression. The NCC, said the council, is “incapable of fair judgment” regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict, a bias that may “prove harmful” to the cause of interreligious dialogue. An NCC spokesperson explained that the resolution addressed the specific issue of cluster bombs and not the entire Middle East situation.
A nine-year-old girl was killed and sixty people were injured when the roof of Walnut Village Church of Christ in Garland, Texas, collapsed just after the opening hymn at a Sunday morning service last month. About 150 persons were attending the service. Many dove under pews when the roof caved in under the pressure of accumulated rain water. City investigators said the roof lacked a drainage system.
A crisis center for teen-age prostitutes is being established in the vice-ridden Times Square area of New York City by Lamb’s Ministries, the outreach unit of the Manhattan Church of the Nazarene. More than $80,000 was raised for the project at a rally last month. Pastor Paul Moore said $250,000 will be needed to run the program the first year. Sam Mayhugh, a clinical psychologist who is a member of the First Church of the Nazarene in Pasadena, California, will serve as executive director of the project. His church contributed $24,000 of the amount raised.
Resigned priests who have married should be allowed to resume their priestly ministries in the Roman Catholic Church, according to 53 per cent of 6,414 priests who responded to a survey sponsored by an 800-member organization of resigned priests. Some 55 per cent of the respondents said they favor optional celibacy for priests, 53 per cent registered approval of the ordination of married men, and 31 per cent advocated the ordination of women as priests.
Statistics compiled by the Episcopal Women’s Caucus show that 73 of 113 women Episcopal priests are serving in church-related positions, most of them in parish ministry. Ten of them, along with three women deacons, have charge of congregations.
Martin Luther King, Sr., canceled a speech that he had been scheduled to deliver at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in Atlanta this month. Instead, he went to Hungary at the invitation of church officials there (several Hungarian churches are named after his late son) to receive an honorary degree of theology. He was also scheduled to visit Czechoslovakia and address the Prague-based Christian Peace Conference. Meanwhile, President Carter’s pastor, Charles A. Trentham of First Baptist Church in Washington, was invited by the Soviet government to visit the Soviet Union this month, and plans called for him to preach in several Baptist churches. Five black Baptist ministers from Washington, D.C., were invited to make a preaching tour of the Soviet Union in July.
Two veteran missionaries from Ebenezer Lutheran Brethren Church in Minneapolis were slain last month in the Republic of Cameroon in Africa. Government sources indicated that Ernest Erickson, 59, and his wife Miriam, 58, may have been victims of a ritual killing by spirit worshipers. The pair served in Cameroon for thirty-four years as missionaries of the 9,000-member Church of the Lutheran Brethren of America. This month, guerrillas in Rhodesia shot and killed two European missionaries at a Roman Catholic mission station near the Botswana border.
Bishop Antonio Teutonico, reputedly the world’s oldest Roman Catholic priest, died on May 31 in a central Italian village. He was 104. The longevity title is now held by priest Edward D. Howard, former acting bishop of Portland, Oregon. He is 100.
Bumper-sticker religion is getting serious. One of the latest messages seen on scattered bumpers proclaims: “Tithe if you love Jesus. Anyone can honk.”
